The invention generally relates to search engines and, in particular, to an associative search methodology, based on a contextual search engine, for retrieving related information. The Internet provides an excellent vehicle for access to information about goods and services on a global basis. In theory, anyone can access information about any product. In practice, the problem is one of finding the correct information. Many techniques for solving this problem are known, including: indexing systems such as Yahoo, graphical electronic malls, hall of malls, directories, and text search engines, such as OpenText. These techniques and tools for searching and retrieving information, in their present form, can inundate the user with large amounts of unwanted material.
This later problem can be alleviated somewhat by enabling the user to provide search statements as a set of criteria which are combined with logical operators, such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ operators. However, many problems still exist with this. One of them is that the user is left to his/her own imagination to try to think of all the alternative descriptions (i.e. keywords) of a product or service. As search engines and techniques become ever more powerful in the number and diversity of databases they can access, the amount of information which it is possible to present to a user can quickly become excessively large. The problem or opportunity still remains to quickly find the relevant information for which the user is looking.